Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl’s mother Virginia discussed her son and Madonna in a new Guardian interview discussing her new book about rock star mothers.
Grohl says that the “bleak days” when young band members or singers “go from city to city with just enough money for hot dogs and Slurpees aren’t what mothers of the musician-adventurers fear”. It’s the “next step, the one where money and fame replace impoverished obscurity”. I ask her about Dave’s new-found celebrity back in the early 90s. “I did worry about women.” Then she laughs: “I don’t know how to tell you this, it’s so embarrassing, but my biggest fear was that Madonna would snatch him up.” As for drugs, she never minded about marijuana (“I’m the only person I know who hasn’t done it yet; I still might”). In any case, Dave gave up mushrooms and weed aged 20, and understood enough about his hyperactive tendencies never to try cocaine or heroin (“You see the way I drink coffee!” he has said. “It’d be all over!”).
She also discusses the Beastie Boys.
Mike D’s mother, an “imperious” intellectual and art collector who lives in a Manhattan penthouse and whom Virginia tells me she found “a little scary”, contributed to her version of “the Conversation” by ruefully commenting that her son’s preferred career choice was “just an excuse for not working”. She had no interest in the Beastie Boys’ hip-hop, yet when she went to see them play, and looked down from the balcony at the dance-hall floor below, which had “become a mosh pit, a tornadic mass of young, fearless lovers of chaos”, she became an unlikely admirer of the band’s shows, crowd-surfing and all: “To me they weren’t about music, but about energy and unbelievable rapport with the audience.”
